RETAIL INSIGHT: DIGITAL RETAIL
Tailor-fitting retail stores to catch up on the digitisation race Retailers would need over 200 hours to manually digitise their inventories, but tech startup Fairmart claims this could be trimmed down to zero.
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etail stores in Southeast Asia could have earned $4.5b more in sales if only consumers could find their products online. Now, these stores, whose operations are mainly physical, are at risk of losing another $4.5b, should they fail to digitise their inventory, tech startup Fairmart said. As an example Fairmart CEO and Co-founder Jan Gasparic shared that he would often search online for new pet food or toy for his dog. But whilst there are three pet stores within the two-kilometre radius from his home, his online searches lead him to marketplaces elsewhere, sometimes even those from overseas. “I would look through the results and I'd see a lot of online listings. Then I would go into the map
section and try to find which one of my local stores actually carries this product. But because the stores don't digitise their inventory, they essentially just do not come up in the search results at all. Now, then I'll keep on scrolling,” he said. “The reason this problem exists is [that] current solutions are essentially made for e-commerce, and they’re a poor fit for the way physical retailers work,” the Fairmart CEO said. He shared that physical retailers have a high number of stockkeeping units with some stores storing more than 2,000 items, making it difficult for retailers to manually digitise their products. Putting local stores on the map This is where the tech startup comes in as Fairmart enables
Current solutions are essentially made for e-commerce, and they’re a poor fit for the way physical retailers work
small businesses to increase foot traffic to retailers by installing an IoT device that allows businesses to digitise products available in their stores. Retail stores then get a real-time feed of the barcodes that are being scanned and, with Fairmart’s software, the stores can automatically generate a list of its products online. “In order for them to manually digitise all their products, they would need over 200 hours of manual data entry each month and we bring that number essentially down to zero,” he said. Gasparic raised that whilst shoppers have gone “irreversibly digital,” it is important that retailers digitise operations as 95% of transactions are expected to happen offline. He also said that consumers
Whilst shoppers have gone “irreversibly digital,” retailers must digitise operations as 95% of transactions are expected to happen offline
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RETAIL ASIA
